The move is being framed by Trump allies as a crackdown on what they see as left-leaning bias in artificial intelligence systems. The post Woke bashing of the week – Trump targets ‘woke’ AI appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.
In the latest volley in the ongoing culture war, President Trump is reportedly preparing an executive order that would effectively blacklist tech companies from receiving federal contracts unless their AI systems are deemed “politically neutral.”
First reported in the Wall Street Journal, the move is being framed by Trump allies as a crackdown on what they see as left-leaning bias in artificial intelligence systems. The policy is being driven by David Sacks, a cryptocurrency advocate and investor who, earlier this year, stood alongside Trump as he signed an executive order to deregulate the controversial crypto industry, and Sriram Krishnan, a tech entrepreneur and current senior White House adviser on AI. Both men have emerged as key architects of Trump’s tech agenda.
At the heart of their concern is a belief frequently echoed by conservative commentators that AI chatbots are “woke.” In other words, any AI model that fails to conform to conservative narratives, particularly on race, gender, or history, is viewed as a threat that needs to be blacklisted.
Disgruntled Republicans point to examples of chatbots generating images of historical figures as people of colour or offering inclusive language as evidence of ideological programming. As the Telegraph keenly reports, a Meta-developed chatbot has been caught in the act of supposed “woke” revisionism.
But this tension isn’t new. Republicans have long accused Silicon Valley of liberal bias, citing examples ranging from content moderation policies to perceived censorship on social media platforms. Now, with the rise of generative AI, the same grievance has found a new target.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who’s own xAI project launched the “anti-woke” chatbot Grok, has become one of the most vocal critics of what he sees as the ideological homogeneity of AI. Grok is essentially Musk’s answer to ChatGPT, a product of OpenAI, the company he co-founded in 2015 but left in 2018 following a reported power struggle with now-CEO Sam Altman. Since then, Musk has condemned ChatGPT for being too left-leaning and even dangerous. xAI, according to Musk, is intended to be a direct competitor to OpenAI, with its Grok chatbot not only serving as ChatGPT’s “anti-woke” counterpart.
“A lot of the AIs that are being trained in the San Francisco Bay Area, they take on the philosophy of people around them,” said Musk. “So you have a woke, nihilistic – in my opinion – philosophy that is being built into these AIs.”
Yet even Grok hasn’t lived up to his vision of ideological purity. Musk recently criticised his own bot after a user accused it of “leftist indoctrination,” prompting him to promise a fix.
The irony of demanding that machines avoid all “bias” while simultaneously pushing them to reflect one’s own beliefs seems lost on many of AI’s loudest conservative critics.
If you’re not already uneasy about a future where the world’s richest men are the ones designing, directing, and controlling the AI systems that threaten to shape everything from information to ideology, you should be.
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The post Woke bashing of the week – Trump targets ‘woke’ AI appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.
